How-to Guides

Using RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is becoming a popular way of disseminating news. There are a number of ways of reading the content in an RSS feed, but all RSS viewers basically offer a number of headlines with dates accompanied by a link to read more.

There are a multitude of RSS readers available, and many web browsers have RSS support built-in.

If you are running Safari on Mac OS 10.4 then RSS feeds will be picked up automatically by showing you an icon on the right of the address bar, which you can click to display the feed in the browser window.

Firefox also has RSS support built-in, from the Biochemistry homepage you should see an orange icon in the bottom right of the browser window. You can click this to get a "Subscribe to..." menu. This will in turn create some "dynamic" bookmarks in your bookmarks menu, which will update as new items appear in the feed.

There are many RSS plugins for Internet Explorer, one that has proved reasonably good for the webmaster is Pluck, freely available from www.pluck.com

2 Subscribing to an RSS feed

The URL for the Biochemistry RSS feed is http://www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/rssfeed. Most web browsers (at the time of writing) won't give you a properly rendered view of the feed by clicking on the above link (most will just show you a raw view of the RSS file, www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/rss/rssfeed.xml), you'll actually need to "subscribe" to the feed by copying & pasting the above link into your RSS reader.

Having told your RSS reader the location of the feed, you should see a list of articles with headlines and links which you can then follow.